Career

Agricultural laborer and llama-herder during his childhood and teen years;
played trumpet in a band; served in the Bolivian army; became a coca
farmer in the Chapare state; elected general secretary of San Francisco,
his local growers' union, 1985; became head of the Tropics
Federation, an alliance of six unions, 1988, and president of its
Coordinating Committee after 1996; elected to Bolivia's Chamber of
Deputies from Chapare, 1997; joined the
Movimiento al Socialismo
party; elected president of Bolivia, 2005.

Sidelights

In December of 2005, Bolivians elected Evo Morales as their
country's next president, and made the popular labor activist the
first person of Amerindian heritage to lead the country. A farmer for most
of his life, Morales entered politics after spending years fighting
international efforts to eliminate Bolivia's coca-leaf crop
industry. "I have been hated, mistreated, humiliated, and thrown
into prison three times for trying to defend my people. But now we are in
government and I want to bring peace and justice for all," he
asserted to Steve Boggan of London's
Guardian
, newspaper a few weeks after taking office. "There will be no
exploitation or discrimination of anyone."

Born in 1959, Morales spent the first years of his life in Isavalli in
Orinoca, a lakeside area whose primary economy is the raising of llamas
and vicuña, a camel-like animal prized for its fine wool. His
family was of Aymara ethnicity, one of the indigenous groups that lived in
what is now Bolivia for centuries prior to European encroachment. Out of
the seven children born in his family, Morales was one of just three to
survive infancy, and spent his earliest years in a one-room adobe hut with
no electricity; the family's livestock were kept in a pen adjacent
to the hut. As a child, he helped take care of their llamas, and began
taking other jobs as soon as he grew old enough. When he was six years
old, Morales, his sister, and their father traveled to Argentina to work
during the annual sugarcane harvest there. His first language was Aymara,
and he learned Spanish only later in his school years.

As a member of Bolivia's indigenous population, Morales was part of
a majority that made up 55 to 70 percent of the citizenry, versus 30 to 45
percent European-heritage Bolivians. Long discriminated
against by the political, economic, and social elite of European
background, Bolivia's Aymara, Quechua, and other Amerindian groups
existed largely as subsistence farmers, eking out a living on tiny plots
of land that rarely vaulted a household past the national poverty line.
Like other young Bolivian men, Morales served a mandatory stint in the
army, after spending a few years as a trumpet player in a band. His family
eventually resettled in Chapare, a part of the country inside the Andes
Mountains. There they grew coca, a traditional Aymara crop. For centuries,
its leaves had been chewed by the Aymara and Quechua as an
appetite-queller that helped them survive periodic food shortages; coca
leaves or coca tea were also effective remedies for altitude sickness
among mountain-dwelling communities. Because of these benefits, the plant
has a religious significance in Bolivia and is entirely legal, but drug
traffickers buy the crop and use it to manufacture cocaine for illicit
consumption elsewhere.

Morales established himself as a
cocalero
, or coca-leaf grower, and rose to prominence in the local growers'
union, called San Francisco. He was elected its general secretary in 1985,
and three years later became head of an umbrella group of six unions that
had become increasingly active in fighting government restrictions on
their livelihood. Bolivia, along with Columbia and Peru, was the target of
U.S.-led efforts to eradicate the crop in order to curb cocaine
consumption at home, and elected officials usually agreed to implement
measures in exchange for generous foreign aid dollars. The cocalero unions
allied to fight this and preserve their sole source of income in a region
where little else could grow. Over the next several years Morales led
marches, met with government and foreign officials, and became the target
of harassment. He was both jailed and fired upon, once by a helicopter of
the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.

As one of the most prominent cocalero union leaders, Morales became widely
known in Chapare. In 1997 he was elected to a seat in Bolivia's
Chamber of Deputies on a coalition ticket made up of representatives from
leftist parties and organizations. He eventually joined the
Movimiento al Socialismo
("Movement toward Socialism") party, which had emerged out
of the cocalero-union movement. Commonly referred to by its acronym,
MAS—a play on the Spanish word for "more"—the
party proved surprisingly popular with Bolivian voters that year, and
gained ground in subsequent national and local elections. In 2002, Morales
became the MAS candidate for president of Bolivia and did surprisingly
well at the polls, but lost in the run-off race. The campaign had been a
tense one, with the U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, Manuel Rochas, making
unfavorable comments about Morales, and even asserting that if Bolivians
chose him as their next president, they could expect the United States to
retaliate in the form of curtailing some of the $100 million in economic
aid to Bolivia, the second-poorest nation in South America. Bolivians were
incensed by Rochas' comments, which were widely perceived as an
attempt to interfere with the democratic process in Bolivia.

Morales returned as the MAS presidential candidate in December of 2005,
and this time won with 54 percent of the vote. Known for his informal
style, which includes colorful striped sweaters and sneakers,
Bolivia's first non-European president has proved a popular new
leader, especially when he followed through on several campaign promises.
Bolivia has vast natural gas reserves, and in a 2004 referendum, Bolivian
voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot question regarding the
nationalization of the country's gas and oil industries. There is
large foreign investment in both industries, not just by U.S.-based
companies but also by Petrobras of Brazil and Repsol YPF, a Spanish
company. In May of 2006, Morales announced the nationalization plan for
the oil and gas industries, with a timeline of just six months.

Morales' rise is considered another piece of evidence signaling a
shift to the left in South American politics. One of his first significant
foreign-policy initiatives was to form an economic alliance with the Cuban
government and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, two of the strongest
critics of U.S. influence in the region. Responding to remarks by
President George W. Bush in which the U.S. leader said Morales's
legitimate victory at the polls is evidence that Bolivia might be moving
away from democracy, Morales reflected in an interview with Tim Padgett of
Time
that "I think Mr. Bush wants us to be a colonized democracy:
dependent, submissive, and subordinate to foreign interests."